Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

A Diphtheria Cure, 1894

Until the late 19th century, diphtheria was a gruesome killer with no known cause and many ineffective treatments. In 1874, The New-York Times printed an advertisement for a medicine that would cure not only diphtheria, but also corns, bunions and “pains in the loins and back.” The same year, a news article began, “There has been spreading for some time an idea or hypothesis among the more philosophic medical men, and among the thoughtful ‘laity,’ that many species of disease have their sources in, and are scattered by, seeds or germs.”

But it was Dec. 7, 1890, before The Times first hinted there might be a real cure for diphtheria. That day a Page 1 article about events in Germany reported that “Drs. Behring and Kitasato found that the blood of immune rats and mice had a destructive effect on the virus of diphtheria.” The reporter was apparently unaware that diphtheria is caused by a bacterium, not a virus, but in any case the treatment was as destructive to humans as it was to the germ — the article went on to report that two human patients transfused with the animals’ blood almost immediately dropped dead.

But progress was fast. On Oct. 1, 1894, a headline on Page 2 read “Repression in the Reichstag,” over a story about European politics. In the ninth paragraph the anonymous reporter changed subjects. “A congress of German naturalists and physicians opened its sessions in Vienna on Monday,” he wrote, and then went on to discuss Emil von Behring’s “discovery of a cure for diphtheria by the inoculation of the patient with serum blood.”

Photo

On Nov. 26, The Times reported that Behring’s “diphtheria anti-toxine” had been commercially imported for the first time, and a lengthy description of the substance and its manufacture appeared on Dec. 9, 1894. That same day a brief article on Page 10 reported that in a diphtheria epidemic in New Rochelle, N.Y., “there have been several quick cures by the use of antitoxine, the new remedy, and the new cases will be treated with it.” By this time, serum was being produced from horse blood in New York City.

In the spring of 1913, Behring developed a vaccine against diphtheria. On May 15, 1914, a short article reported that the French newspaper Le Matin had declared the serum one of “the Seven Wonders of the modern world.” The other six were “the aeroplane, wireless, radium, the locomotive, human grafting and the dynamo.”

The vaccine was not widely distributed until the 1920s. On March 13, 1921, a Page 14 headline read “Begins Work to End Diphtheria Here.”

Today’s vaccine, recommended for all infants and for adults who have not been immunized, is manufactured by treating the diphtheria toxin with heat and chemicals, destroying its ability to produce disease but allowing it to stimulate the production of antibodies. Because the vaccine is so effective and so widely used, diphtheria is rare in industrialized countries, but when it does occur it can be treated with diphtheria antitoxin.

In the United States, the medicine is available only through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which imports it from Brazil, one of the few countries in the world that still manufactures it. NICHOLAS BAKALAR